Impact of Cache Locality

In the past, we didn't have the opportunity to evaluate as many CPUs as we do today. The hardware ecosystem was simple – Intel had consistently delivered industry leading processors. Other vendors could not compete with them on both performance and cost. Recently it all changed: AMD has been challenging the status quo with their 2nd Gen EPYC processors.

This is not the first time that Intel has been challenged; previously there was Qualcomm, and we worked with AMD and considered their 1st Gen EPYC processors and based on the original Zen architecture, but ultimately, Intel prevailed. AMD did not give up and unveiled their 2nd Gen EPYC processors codenamed Rome based on the latest Zen 2 architecture.

This made many improvements over its predecessors. Improvements include a die shrink from 14nm to 7nm, a doubling of the top end core count from 32 to 64, and a larger L3 cache size. Let’s emphasize again on the size of that L3 cache, which is 32 MiB L3 cache per Core Complex Die (CCD).

This time around, we have taken steps to Continue reading

NTT Fuels Academic Research Into Security

McAfee Gets SASE, Buys Light Point Security

Ostinato – Packet Generator – Test your broadcast and mitigation strategies

I used ostinato long before when it was in early stages probably, at that point I never had any real need to use a packet generator as the place I was working was already equipped with IXIA and Spirant best in Class Packet generators.

https://ostinato.org/ – is the link

Whats the use case – Well I wanted to test LSP loadbalancing and also specific scenario of BUM traffic and how well it can be contained lets say in Switching level QFX and also VPLS level

Its doing a good job, though it started as open source, author now sells it with some minimal fee to keep up with the development costs.

You could also use scapy and i wrote a small program to do this , problem is scapy sorts of waits for some of the responses and i have not yet figured out what needs to be solved there

Testing Ostinato on QFX and its really good so far. Storm control got in and stopped transmitting any packets through the interface.

At the end, this is a nice to have tool for any sort of packet crafting and limited scale testing for proof of concept scenarios.

-Rakesh

Daily Roundup: Google Loves Intel’s Security Transparency

CenturyLink CSO Decries Abundant, Niche Security Services

For secure data backup, here’s how to do the 3-2-1 rule right

As the number of places where we store data increases, the basic concept of what is referred to as the 3-2-1 rule often gets forgotten. This is a problem, because the 3-2-1 rule is easily one of the most foundational concepts for designing data protection. It's important to understand why the rule was created, and how it's currently being interpreted in an increasingly tapeless world.What is the 3-2-1 rule for backup? The 3-2-1 rule says there should be at least three copies or versions of data stored on two different pieces of media, one of which is off-site. Let's take a look at each of the three elements and what it addresses.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] 3 copies or versions: Having at least three different versions of your data over different periods of time ensures that you can recover from accidents that affect multiple versions. Any good backup system will have many more than three copies. 2 different media: You should not have both copies of your data on the same media. Consider, for example, Apple's Time Machine. You can fool it using Disc Utility to split your hard drive into Continue reading

Red Hat OpenStack Update Angles Toward Cloud-Native Future

Mirantis Collects Kontena Kubernetes Cast-Offs

Nokia Bolsters Cloud-Native Software

Infovista’s José Duarte Outlines 5G Deployment Strategy

Why Google Trusts Intel’s Security Strategy

Mellanox ConnectX-6 SmartNIC Arrives, BlueField-2 on the Way

BrandPost: Why Hard Drives Are Stayin’ Alive

It goes without saying that data growth is at an all-time high, but IDC’s data forecast provides much-needed perspective. The market research company predicts that by 2023, over 100 zettabytes of data will be created per year, and that approximately 60% of the stored data will be at the core/edge data center1. At the same time, Applied Materials predicts that over 90% of total data will be created by machines2 with new workloads driven by everything from smart video cameras and IoT sensors to autonomous vehicles and hyper-connected smart cities, and more.To read this article in full, please click here

An EPYC trip to Rome: AMD is Cloudflare’s 10th-generation Edge server CPU

More than 1 billion unique IP addresses pass through the Cloudflare Network each day, serving on average 11 million HTTP requests per second and operating within 100ms of 95% of the Internet-connected population globally. Our network spans 200 cities in more than 90 countries, and our engineering teams have built an extremely fast and reliable infrastructure.

We’re extremely proud of our work and are determined to help make the Internet a better and more secure place. Cloudflare engineers who are involved with hardware get down to servers and their components to understand and select the best hardware to maximize the performance of our stack.

Our software stack is compute intensive and is very much CPU bound, driving our engineers to work continuously at optimizing Cloudflare’s performance and reliability at all layers of our stack. With the server, a straightforward solution for increasing computing power is to have more CPU cores. The more cores we can include in a server, the more output we can expect. This is important for us since the diversity of our products and customers has grown over time with increasing demand that requires our servers to do more. To help us drive compute performance, we needed Continue reading

BrandPost: C&S Takes Stock in Unity EdgeConnect SD-WAN Edge Platform

Keeping up to date on inventory, stocking, and data needs at thousands of grocery stores in North America is no easy task. That’s why C&S Wholesale Grocers decided it needed a major upgrade of its network using SD-WAN technology from Silver Peak to provide efficient, reliable, and secure communications among its data centers and warehouses. Founded in 1918, C&S is the largest grocery wholesaler in the United States. C&S recently embarked on a major network upgrade focused on implementing SD-WAN technology. The company selected the Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect™ SD-WAN edge platform to enable more efficient and cost effective wide-area-networking (WAN) to support a variety of applications. To read this article in full, please click here

Security that’s Designed for the Modern Data Center

The last 12 months have been incredibly exciting for the security business at VMware. Last year at RSA Conference 2019, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined our Intrinsic Security strategy in his keynote presentation, “3 Things the Security Industry Isn’t Talking About”. We also announced the VMware Service-defined Firewall, a stateful Layer 7 data center firewall. As pioneers of micro-segmentation, the Service-defined Firewall extended our leadership in protecting east-west traffic in the data center.

Later in the year, we announced two major acquisitions –Avi Networks and Carbon Black. The acquisition of Carbon Black brought to VMware an industry-leading endpoint security platform, and made the entire industry take notice of VMware’s intentions to transform security. With Avi Networks, we acquired a software-defined, elastic, and high-performance load balancer that comes equipped with a full-featured web application firewall (WAF). Maintaining the momentum in building out our security portfolio for the digital enterprise, we announced the VMware NSX Distributed Intrusion Detection and Prevention System which will bring advanced threat controls to the Service-defined Firewall.

At RSA Conference 2020, we are introducing VMware Advanced Security for Cloud Foundation, a modern data center security solution for today’s private and public clouds. This solution will include VMware Carbon Continue reading

Pragmatic EVPN Designs

While running the Using VXLAN And EVPN To Build Active-Active Data Centers workshop in early December 2019 I got the usual set of questions about using BGP as the underlay routing protocol in EVPN fabrics, and the various convoluted designs like IBGP-over-EBGP or EBGP-between-loopbacks over directly-connected-EBGP that some vendors love so much.

I got a question along the same lines from one of the readers of my latest EPVN rant who described how convoluted it is to implement the design he’d like to use with the gear he has (I won’t name any vendor because hazardous chemical substances get mentioned when I do).

Cisco goes to the cloud with broad enterprise security service

Cisco has unveiled a cloud-based security platform it says will go a long way in helping customers protect their far-flung networked resources.Cisco describes the new SecureX service as offering  an open, cloud-native system that will let customers detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. IT security teams can then automate and orchestrate security management across enterprise cloud, network and applications and end points.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Until now, security has largely been piecemeal with companies introducing new point products into their environments to address every new threat category that arises,” wrote Gee Rittenhouse senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group in a blog about SecureX.To read this article in full, please click here

Cisco goes to the cloud with broad enterprise security service

Cisco has unveiled a cloud-based security platform it says will go a long way in helping customers protect their far-flung networked resources.Cisco describes the new SecureX service as offering  an open, cloud-native system that will let customers detect and remediate threats across Cisco and third-party products from a single interface. IT security teams can then automate and orchestrate security management across enterprise cloud, network and applications and end points.Network pros react to new Cisco certification curriculum “Until now, security has largely been piecemeal with companies introducing new point products into their environments to address every new threat category that arises,” wrote Gee Rittenhouse senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Security Business Group in a blog about SecureX.To read this article in full, please click here